Utility lines, such as lines for telephones, electricity distribution, natural gas, cable television, fiber optics, Internet, traffic lights, street lights, storm drains, water mains, and wastewater pipes, are often located underground. Utility lines are referred to as “buried assets” herein. Consequently, before excavation occurs in an area, especially an urban area, an excavator is typically required to clear excavation activities with the proper authorities. The clearance procedure usually includes contacting a central authority that in turn notifies the appropriate utility companies. Subsequently, each utility company must perform a buried asset detection procedure, which includes visiting the excavation site, detecting the relevant buried assets and physically marking the position of the buried asset using temporary paint or flags. Upon completion of this procedure by the appropriate utility companies, excavation can occur with the security that buried assets will not be damaged.
A variety of problems are associated with the device typically used for collecting buried asset data. Usually, a technician visiting a proposed excavation site utilizes a device called a conventional locator—a commercial, off-the-shelf, utility locator that detects and identifies buried assets using radio frequency and/or magnetic sensors. Because a conventional locator device includes processing units for executing complex signal processing algorithms, which may include multiple circuit cards, locators can be expensive, bulky and unreliable. Further, once a locator has been purchased and fielded, its processing speed, and the algorithms it executes, are fixed and do not stay up to date with current processing speeds and advances in signal processing. Considering the fast rate at which processing speeds increase and algorithms become more efficient, locators can quickly become outdated. Thus, a locator that is considered “state of the art” with advanced features and functions on the date of its purchase, may be considered outdated and slow in a relatively short period of time.
Conventional locators (commonly known as “pipe or cable locator receivers”) are portable, self-contained electronic devices carried by a field operator who walks over the target pipe or cable and receives an electromagnetic or acoustic signal from the buried conductor. A transmitter in the locator applies a signal to the buried asset. The locator includes detection antenna arrays, signal processing hardware and software, a display screen and power supply management circuits. The locator's display screen displays position and depth information to the operator. A plethora of hardware, such as digital signal processing circuits, displays, and power management circuits increase the complexity of a locator, increase the cost of manufacturing, reduce reliability and consequently increase the sales price of a locator. For this reason, it can be cost prohibitive for organizations that require large numbers of locators for their workforce to purchase the number of locators they require.
Therefore, a need exists for improvements over the prior art, and more particularly for methods and systems that reduce the complexity, usability and costs of devices and systems that detect buried asset data for excavation sites, while allowing such methods and systems to leverage advances in hardware and software.